Gaucho

The fit out of this Scottish flagship restaurant aims to compete with the high-end F&B market in Edinburgh with the latest site overlooking St Andrews Square.

CTC were appointed to team up with Conceptualise on design matters, whilst Project managing, Cost managing and completing all procurement for fixtures and fittings. CTC were also involved from the pre-acquisition stage to review the landlord’s technical information.  Once we had produced a full and detailed drawing package, using our expertise and knowledge from previous projects in Scotland, we coordinated and vetted all other consultants and contractor’s drawings for compliance to enable the Building Warrant to be submitted.  We managed the project on a tight programme due to stresses on a pre-Christmas opening.

The space being over two floors, with a small ground floor street presence and a large basement for the restaurant created challenges during the design phase.  To utilise the ground floor space, a large void between the ground and basement floors was infilled, this allowed a small and cosy bar to be created at ground floor level to increase the visibility into the restaurant.  The staircase was installed at the front of the restaurant to allow guests to access the restaurant without walking through the bar, its location also ensured the best view of the basement layout to give the wow factor, sometimes hard to achieve in a basement without natural light.  The interior style for this site evolved from the previous refurbishments of the Piccadilly and Broadgate restaurants where inspiration had been taken from the ombu trees in Argentina with their soft grey colours, sculptural, swirling branches, roots and striking leaves.  We installed central ‘trees’ with feature criss-crossing curves of pale carved wood and bespoke artwork to replicate the image of the ombu leaf.